Wireless communication technologies have seen explosive growth over the past few years. This growth has been fueled by wireless services providing freedom of movement to the mobile public and cutting the tether to hardwired communication systems. As a result of service enhancements, the popularity of wireless services is expected to continue to grow rapidly.
A recent addition to wireless communication services has been the ability to view social network updates for friends and content on receiver devices using services like Twitter®, MySpace®, LinkedIn®, and Facebook®. Social network updates are posts made by a user using the social network that are viewable by other users. A problem in the art is that when highly popular users provide a status update, or “tweet,” such as Lady Gaga®, millions of users may download the same tweet, posting or status update. This download may occur from multiple different social networks. This download may result in the creation of millions of service requests to a server and millions of responses to the request from computing devices.
For example, when entertainer Michael Jackson died on Jun. 25, 2009, the BBC reported that social network Twitter® servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words “Michael Jackson” at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. Additionally, if Lady Gaga® or another highly popular user delivers multimedia data in a status update, or alternatively if a highly popular user provides a hyperlink to TwitPic® so a user can view an uploaded picture, such actions may result in millions of social network users requesting a large amount of data from a server, which can be burdensome to the communication networks carrying such traffic. This can be a particularly difficult problem for mobile communication networks which are already operating at near peak capacity, particularly at certain times of the day.